Patterns

Empathy is an expression of the human tendency for pattern-perception, namely the pattern of correlation between feeling and behavior. If I build a friendship with a person, establish a mutually beneficial relationship involving habits of give and take, then find one day that I am let down in a time of need without explanation, I should justly feel anger and betrayal. If I experienced this same buildup and let-down at the hands of a computer, I would rightly be judged a neurotic who needs to get out more. My experiences in these situations are identical, but in the case of the computer most would agree that I'm seeing a connection between behavior and intention that isn't there, because computers aren't people. We know they aren't people, because we don't see in them the pattern of behavior we see in people.

What if this ability of pattern-perception, linking feeling to action, were absent? Whether because feelings themselves are absent, or the connection just isn't made, it does happen sometimes that humans will not see other humans as people any more than they will see computers as people. If they grow angry in such a situation, it is over just as petty an issue as "it" not working like it should.

So. Mistakes of empathy may occur at two extremes: as an excess which makes us think of things as people, and a deficiency which makes us think of people as things. But I ask again, as I have elsewhere, how is a mistake to be gauged  What is the "right" amount of empathy to feel, the True pattern, which accurately reflects reality?

I find myself speculating on the extremes. Is the personality of another person entirely my own creation? Is there Really a pattern to reality, or just a very large opportunity to find things to understand?